Trying to access our inner life can feel like entering an underworld of dark, nonsensical obscurity. When we’re in emotional distress, how do we penetrate this darkness? How do we rescue ourselves from suffering and self-defeat?
Whatever misery or ineptitude we’re experiencing, chances are good we can get relief through the self-knowledge revealed by depth psychology. With this knowledge, we can more easily stop committing sins of harm and abuse against our own self and against each other. This is our secular salvation.
Depth psychology exposes one’s inner conflict. You can quickly start becoming your best self as you recognize the dynamics of inner conflict in your psyche. Once you understand this conflict in yourself, you are engaged in the process of resolving it. To see and understand the conflict is to be intent on resolving it. We begin by observing our daily thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the light of self-knowledge that exposes the existence and dynamics of inner conflict.
In this post, I give examples of how a new, more conscious attentiveness to one’s experiences brings inner conflict into focus. But first, I say a bit about inner conflict and its main dynamics.
Just about everyone has some degree of inner conflict. Impulses, drives, and desires clash mysteriously inside us. Often, we act completely irrationally. We want pleasure but feel pain, we want safety but feel fear, we want to be wise but often act stupidly. Consciously, we want to be emotionally strong—yet we’re often plagued by self-doubt and weak self-regulation.
Inner conflict can manifest in many ways. I describe 50 examples here. The emotional tussle between wanting to be strong versus feeling stuck in weakness (and mired in its accompanying guilt and shame) is itself an inner conflict that prevails in our emotional life or psyche.
Usually, a person is conscious only of the symptoms of inner conflict rather than the underlying conflict itself. Such symptoms include anger, loneliness, anxiety, indecision, moodiness, depression, cynicism, confusion, self-pity, and mediocrity. These symptoms, when chronic, generate much displeasure, unhappiness, fear, and self-sabotage.
A passive mentality or identification is a major ingredient in inner conflict. Often, people identify with inner passivity, which is a fear-tainted self-doubt at the core of inner conflict. Inner passivity exists on one side of inner conflict, and it contends with an aggressive side, our inner critic. Much of the time, our inner critic (or superego) presides as the master of our inner life, while inner passivity (the weak unconscious ego) reacts as an enabler that tolerates the inner critic’s presumptions and absorbs its abusive attacks.
In reaction to being stuck in this passive sense of self, we’re desperate to feel some compensating strength. Through our conscious ego, we start to manifest corrupted strength in forms such as cynicism, chronic complaining, righteous indignation, defiant stubbornness, irrational assertions, and passive-aggressive behaviors. Our better self eludes us under the weight of having an aggressive side of us—the inner critic—on the attack against our passive side. This passive side is the originator of our psychological defenses.
Many people are determined (though it’s largely unconscious) to go on knowing themselves through the sense of weakness that arises from inner conflict. They’re trapped in this psychological predicament (a sticking point in human evolution) because they don’t understand their personal psychology and are highly resistant to learning it.
People resist looking deeply into their psyche because they feel instinctively that the self-knowledge to be found there will disrupt (if not annihilate) their familiar sense of self. Even when in emotional pain, we’re fearful of letting go of this ego-based sense of self. We hide out behind our conscious ego, which is just a shadow of our better self. Our conscious ego serves as a shield that protects us from frightening doubts about our value and worthiness. Our conscious ego is loath to look beyond itself. When we identify with this ego, we hide inner reality from ourselves. Should we dare go deeper for psychological truth, we fear we’ll be mocked as a phony or loser for having been so ignorant of inner reality.
Indeed, we’re all susceptible to being criticized or mocked for our ignorance and limitations—but this mean-spirited self-criticism arises mainly as inner conflict generated by our unkind and often cruel inner critic, the superego, a primitive, biologically-based self-aggression that is the template for much of the malice, corruption, and violence in the world. Again, this primitive side of our nature can be overcome with self-knowledge.
Inner conflict weakens us emotionally. In compensation, we’re often eager to feel some semblance of power. But the power we settle for is illusory. Consider the followers of a morally corrupt leader. They become followers because, through identification with this person’s alleged power, they can “borrow” that sense of power and feel within themselves—through their impassioned defiance, stubborn irrationality, and group loyalty—a gratifying illusion of power. Their gratification is felt largely through the unconscious claim they make that they are choosing to align themselves with strength. But this claim arises from their unconscious refusal to recognize the elements of their inner weakness and disharmony, along with their psychological disconnection from their better self. Their gratification is also felt through their stubborn conviction that (like their corrupt leader) they don’t need to look objectively at themselves since their anger and contentiousness are, as they see it, legitimate reactions to the malice and folly of their adversaries.
Psychological dynamics such as these apply, too, with mass shooters. In the vast majority of mass shootings and mass murders, the perpetrators are not mentally ill. Studies say mass shooters display, as their common characteristics, social isolation, nihilism, emptiness, anger, and self-hatred. All of these are symptoms of acute inner conflict. Inner conflict, when especially intense, produces self-hatred. In unconscious denial of the true source of one’s misery, the hatred is projected outward, and others are seen misleadingly as the source of the hatred. The psychological resistance induced by our conscious ego makes us loath to come to terms with inner conflict.
In a commonplace example of inner conflict, a chronic resistance to doing daily chores or exercise involves the unconscious temptation to experience oneself through familiar inner weakness and passivity. This failure to perform at one’s best induces the inner critic to mock one’s weakness, triggering defensiveness from the passive side and intensifying inner conflict. Succumbing to inner conflict is the path of least resistance.
Another commonplace conflict involves the struggle of many to regulate their consumption of food or the quality of their diet. Food, diet, and weight issues are often just the symptoms of deep inner conflict. Many people use their emotional struggles with food, diet, and weight as a playing field upon which to experience inner conflict with its accompanying weakness and passivity. In these cases, food or diet have become the pretext or opportunity to recycle inner conflict. People unconsciously use the challenge of healthy dieting as a ploy through which they can recycle and replay their inner conflict, thereby compulsively repeating experiences of unresolved weakness and helplessness.
In this example with food or diet, our inner critic and inner passivity are likely to be involved in a tense standoff. The inner critic harasses and mocks us for our weakness of self-regulation. From the passive side, we take the accusation to heart and try to defend ourselves, perhaps promising to try harder, while taking on guilt and shame about our health or weight. We now become stuck in this inner conflict, experiencing painful, weak self-regulation for months and years as our struggles with food and weight persist.
We want our consciousness to penetrate to the heart of the issue so we can feel a growing ability to stop mindlessly participating in the conflict. Usually, people identify with the passive, defensive side of the conflict. But other times, in situations that are more painful, the person can identify with the accusing, mocking inner critic. This occurs when the inner struggle escalates, the passive side’s defensiveness collapses, and the individual descends into self-condemnation or self-hatred.
We can pull yourself out of the conflict by refusing to participate in inner conflict’s back-and-forth accusations and defensiveness. We can step back and observe the conflict with clinical awareness or watchful detachment, sensing both the inner critic’s attacks and inner passivity’s defensiveness, and then declining to engage in the back and forth. We can observe the conflict without personalizing it. Like a scientist examining a specimen, we can now see our emotional and behavioral issue with clinical acuity. Now we’re liberating ourselves from inner conflict. We can feel strength arise from our insight and our growing ability to refrain from taking our weakness personally. This new perspective and perception are akin to suddenly being able to see the previously unrecognized feature of an optical illusion.
There are many daily situations, other than with food or diet, in which this process of inner watchfulness and understanding can be applied. When, for instance, you’re feeling tormented by a person’s aggression or insensitivity toward you, you can catch yourself in the act of embellishing a sense of being refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, or betrayed. You see your weakness, your willingness to recycle the pain of that unresolved hurt from your past. Again, the way we get strong is by seeing and owning the deep weakness, which is, essentially, our passive willingness to absorb punishment from the inner critic as well as our compulsion to continue to be triggered by our unresolved first hurts from childhood.
We can also assimilate this knowledge by understanding the visual drive. We all have a visual drive, which is the impulse to take in visual impressions to protect ourselves, learn from our environment, and enjoy life. Ideally, the visual drive is a function we regulate for the better. Sometimes, though, that function is taken over by inner conflict and inner passivity. Then we start using our eyes mindlessly, in ways that generate inner conflict and magnify negative impressions.
Say you’re lonely and walking alone in a shopping mall. Your eyes are scanning passers-by to see them having a good time. This negative peeping is your unconscious willingness to deepen your sense of loneliness and intensify your passive disconnection from your better self. Inner conflict can now intensify as your inner critic assails you for being an unworthy loser. If we are more conscious of how we can misuse our visual drive, our collusion in our own suffering comes into focus.
Out of inner weakness, people fail to regulate their mind as well as their visual drive. We want to understand that our mind, like our visual drive, is a function that, ideally, we oversee. We don’t want to give our mind the power to decide what content it’s going to process. If we do, we are being passive to our mind (as our mind itself is being passive to our psyche and the directives of inner conflict). Observing our mind with this understanding deepens us and connects us with strength. Our mind won’t run off and get into mischief, acting as a reflector or enforcer of our psyche’s conflicted directives, when we understand our own psychology.
